Today AMD is introducing its newest revision of the Athlon XP to the world. The "Barton" core packs 512K of L2 cache, twice that of previous Athlon XPs. We've examined the Barton core in depth at speed ratings of 2500+, 2800+, and 3000+ versus the previous "Thoroughbred" core and, of course, against the Pentium 4 with and without Hyper-Threading and RDRAM. Not only that, but we've presented the new Athlon XP's larger cache visually, so you can see exactly what impact the extra cache has on memory access performance. It's kinda trippy.

Keep reading to find out whether AMD's latest can retake the top spot.